Word of Wisdom

Bonjour! 01/05/2015

The past week has been pretty good. It has been a little tougher than the week of Christmas as more people party for the New Year. Which mostly means they just drink a ton. It’s been good though. We’ve had a pretty mixed up program with the holiday but its still worked out for us.

On Wednesday we had interviews with President. This was my last one with him as the next one will be for my going home interview. It was a really good one and very comforting as well. It was really cool at the end he talked about how when he was back home, right before the New Year he would offer a blessing to each of his kids. And as we are now somewhat considered his sons on the mission, he offered each of us that day a blessing as well. It was awesome and one I will always remember no doubt. Along with the week of New Years, there were some restrictions on going out, so we were a little limited that way, yet we still got a lot of lessons done.

Our Amis Olivier is coming along well, and is still as enthusiastic as ever, as I said before he has to get married first, so were praying that will happen quickly! On New Years day though we saw him just for a lesson, but sure enough we showed up and the table was covered with food. (As he is super rich and generous) and we ate like kings. We honestly left pretty sick so luckily it was our last appointment before going back to the apartment. We continue to help our other Amis to progress to the baptism, and it’s going well. On top of the Amis we had at church last week, we had another 2 new ones come this week, which was awesome! I ended up teaching Elders Quorum instead of Relief Society, and it was interesting to see that more than half of the class was our Amis. Its nice as when the church is getting started or built somewhere, it needs a lot of solid Melchizedek Priesthood holders, so we’ve been really blessed in finding those that are qualified for that. The branch is coming a long pretty well, and its nice as all the members are recent converts, they don’t have much experience, but are pretty energetic still.

We started our little program of doing the sacrament for the shut ins this past week seeing that it will help the older people a ton, but at the same time help the young men. Our other two Amis Eli and Jeremie the brothers are doing awesome. Like I said I’ve never really met someone like them. He claims to have read the bible already 26 times, and if you talk to him you start to believe its true, but its been really interesting to see that he sees that there are many things he still doesn’t know, and that we have because of the restoration, so he’s always pushing to learn a lot more about the message. We have some awesome Amis right now.

My companion is doing well and is still super obedient and hardworking so we’ve been working like crazy. With the training it’s been nice, as it’s helped me remember some of those important fundamentals in missionary work. It’s awesome though. I can see that it is very true about how the end of the mission is without doubt the best and most effective part, as you seem to be at the prime part. I hope to be able to keep that till the end, but its going really well so far with all that we have going on in our secteur.

We have a lot of families that are progressing also. They too are held back by the marriage, along with a lot of other problems in the family like alcohol and such. We have one family in particular where they are all accepting the gospel very well, but the father is very alcoholic and abusive. To show how much he loves alcohol, one of his sons is named Bacardi. Which is an alcohol brand. So we’ve been working a lot in that area with him as we’ve seen clearly that the word of wisdom seems to be the root of all the problems in the family.

Like I said our secteur is pretty out there so we walk like crazy. I would say we walk more than I did back in Be Kpota. Along with that it’s dustier than ever as its Hamadan season. Where the wind blows down from the Sahara bringing a cooler dry wind, which is really nice. Things are good in our apartment, we decided to start eating together, as I figured it would be nice to eat nothing but pate and rice till the end of my mission, that way when I get home the food will be that much better. Things are going great here though all round! I hope all is well there.

I love and miss you all a ton!

Elder Oliverson